Django New York, 2017 I managed to blag a trip to New York, to meet the chaps I'd be working with over the coming months. It was my first time inside the Big Apple, and a good way to swap one winter for another. A long but mostly uneventful day. I didn’
Improv My first improv class The group seemed nice, and really warmed up as the evening progressed. I got triggered in a way I haven’t in a long time, as I think one of the group was really only able to make jokes that were offensive, possibly because it was the easiest way to
Steven Page at the Hare & Hounds Sort of a day of minor letdowns, ending nicely but with me feeling a bit unfulfilled. I’d hoped to meet Steven Page at the Brum Radio studio as part of Paul Hadsley’s show. It had been in the works for a couple of weeks, but in the morning
Work The hangover Too much wine is a bad idea. More than two regular-sized glasses and I’m no good. Woke up with an absolute stinker of a headache. Really horrible. Glad I had some decent painkillers, as they seem to have worked their magic, pretty much. Well, that and coffee. So it
Work I made a mess on the Internet Rough day. It started early - I got up before 6am - and got to work on a new idea for solving the RSS problem. I’d been storing feeds in S3 very recently, but getting NginX to silently redirect to those feeds. This meant that NginX was often busy
Meditations The Blue Window You see a blue square on a wall, quite a few feet ahead of you. Slowly you walk towards it, and as you do so, you notice that the square has recessed edgers, almost like a window. As you move even closer, you feel a blast of warm air followed
Seven days in Brighton I needed a holiday. But as I found out, you can't take a holiday from yourself. Here's what I got up to in London-on-Sea. Day one I’ve landed. The room’s nice enough but the staff seem really nice. The fan was a bit broken
Work A year in review Technically speaking, Bloomsbury Digital began its life around October 2015, but it didn't really spring into action until July of this year, after a few weeks of stress. Six months on and things are looking strong for my little studio. This is the most successful freelance venture I&
Podcasting Some untidy thoughts on podcasting TLDR: I'm fed up with the tech around podcasting; it's created a barrier and someone needs to step up to own the space, to make it easy for my parents to receive and enjoy podcasts wherever they want to, like Amazon Prime or Netflix. In my
Work Hands-free punch-and-roll with Adobe Audition on a Mac Punch-and-roll is a technique voice actors use when recording on their own setups, to easily manage those moments when you fluff a line. When you hit a stumbling block, you hit a button, spool the track back a few seconds, let it play and then resume recording over the bit
Work I risked my health to start this business. Was it worth it? After a trip to Atlanta in September 2015 I did a little soul-searching, and came to the conclusion I wasn't happy in my job. I worked for a great agency who was attracting diverse and interesting clients, but I'd lost that lovin' feelin', to
Archive The insidious chilling effect of communities built on compassion Here are some facts upon which we can readily agree: * People on the Internet are kind of the worst, a lot of the time. * You should never read the comments. * It would be great if people could be nice to one-another. I like communities that are warm and that look
Technical Creating embeddable content for WordPress 4.4 I'm working on a web video service for agencies that I'll be launching soon, and a feature I thought might be nice was to enable content to be embedded into web pages. Since WordPress 4.4, as long as you play by their rules, WordPress will
Archive Missed Connections... and being "that guy" I'm writing this directly after returning home from seeing Frank Turner at the O2 Academy in Birmingham, so what you read might be misspelled, ranty or unfair. If so, apologies (if you care). In the shuffle back from back room of the Academy to the exit, I got
Archive The ego diet Remember when you were young, and you were certain you'd become a famous pop star, footballer, rocket surgeon or whatever? Well, I'm 32 now and that feeling has remained with me. Until a couple of weeks ago. My holiday to DragonCon taught me that I needed
Archive The man with the unending fascination with the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo A trip to Stockholm for an event that was OK was the perfect excuse to see some of the sights that inspired my favourite trilogy in modern fiction: Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" trilogy (you know, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and all that). Bellmansgatan 1, where
Archive Heads-up innovators: don't leave the visually impaired behind Between Google Glass and the Oculus Rift, there are some amazing pieces of technology being built around content beamed straight into your eyes from a very short distance. This is great, except if you have a problem that affects your depth of focus. I've been blind since birth,
Archive Alan Turing was gay, but we forgive him Alan Turing is regarded by many as one of the parents of computing (I don't say fathers as not all of those that gave birth to the things that power this Internet machine were dudes). During World War II he was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park and helped
Archive It ain't what you do If we respect the premise that some bands are better than others, why don't we all listen to the best band? You can demonstrably tell that some musicians are better than others, but we make our choices not based on an innate sense of quality, but on feelings.
Django Blind man bluffs it in Poland I got the opportunity to go to Warsaw for DjangoCon EU, 2013. Here's how I got on. I often joke about how I've jumped out of an aeroplane, but that I'm scared of public speaking, even though I was an am-dram kid. I know,
Archive Meditations on thirty On Thursday my speedometer clocked over from 29 to 30. I feel as though part of my generation and of that just before it is bound always to push milestone decades back one year, so that 40 is the new 30, 50 is the new 40, and so on, because
Work Where we're going, we don't need roads So after a year in the wilderness, having fun and making mistakes, I'm returning to Substrakt, frankly the best digital agency I've ever worked with. Contrary to what some might think, this isn't a step backwards or some tacit admission of failure. It was
Archive The joy of touch, and how Apple are killing it I like to touch things. A few years back I bought a DAB and Internet radio because I wanted a physical piece of kit that had buttons, and wasn't controlled by my increasingly-ubiquitous (then) PC. I enjoyed driving a radio studio that used CD players because of the
Work NBT007: Nymbol If you were at last month's Tech Wednesday you'll have seen this already, but if not: this is what all my "Next Big Thing" posts have been leading up to. Nymbol is a content management system for the physical world. As our signup page
Work Lessons learned from the death of a digital startup It'll have escaped the attention of just about everyone that Meegloo is no longer available. I pulled the site down a few weeks ago to save money for my Next Big Thing, and the distinct lack of reaction - from anyone - goes some way to explaining why
